With the significant growth of urban tourism due to low-cost flights and cheap accommodation offers, the challenging phenomenon of overtourism arose in several European cities. As a reaction to the negative consequences of overtourism, like e.g. increasing rental prices, the anti-tourism movement emerged. This social movement has attracted worldwide media attention and also tourism researchers became aware of it. As this topic is highly relevant in the field of tourism and sustainability but there are still research gaps, this study aims at investigating how the different roles and interests of the actors in the issue of anti-tourism are represented in the media. This research is conducted as a case study of Barcelona, an exemplar of an anti-tourism affected city. For examining the research problem, newspaper articles about anti-tourism in Barcelona have been analyzed. The findings suggest that the media represent various interests of the actors by using certain communicative mechanisms. Those representations of the involved actors tend to be rather negative, which could be due to the media’s quest for sensationalism.